


the nundu

by bluebeholder



Series: the accidental epic [9]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Half an Infinity of Research Again, Pre-Canon, background politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 18:29:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11537982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: In 1926, Newt comes to Northern Rhodesia looking for that most fearsome of beasts: the Nundu. Somehow, his plans to simply observe it go entirely awry.





	the nundu

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Highly_Illogical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Highly_Illogical/gifts).



> Look at that: more origin fic. Whoops. Highly_Illogical, you’ve become part of the Enabler Troupe. <3

It’s early September in Southern Rhodesia, and it is dry. Newt can’t come up with enough water to keep himself from parching. Luckily, it’s a reasonable temperature. In a few months, or so he’s heard, it’s going to be hot. By then, Newt hopes to be out of Africa and on his way toward North or South America. At the moment, though, he’s traveling alone across the Savanna, looking to be particularly stupid. He isn’t here as a sightseer or tourist—he’s here as a magizoologist. Newt is going to study the most deadly of magical beasts, the Nundu, in its natural habitat. 

When Newt said that, his Ndebele contact had laughed himself sick.

“I have seen plenty of stupid British men but you are an exceptionally stupid specimen,” Thabani said, when he was done laughing. “You sound like some Muggle big-game hunter looking for a trophy!”

“I’m not looking for a trophy,” Newt said irritably. “I want to watch the Nundu, not kill it.”

Thabani shook his head. “Even if you wanted to, you’d certainly fail,” he said. “It takes a hundred wizards working together to even subdue one.”

“Well, has anyone just tried watching one?” Newt asked. 

“How do you think we know so much about the Nundu?” Thabani inquired dryly. “We have eyes, Scamander. You sound like those British Muggles you claim to dislike.”

Properly chastened, Newt nodded. “Right. Sorry. Well. I still want to see one myself.”

Newt didn’t understand exactly what Thabani muttered, since it was in isiNdebele, but he still got the gist. Thabani really thought Newt was an idiot. “I have a copy of a map you can use,” Thabani said with a sigh. “No one will go with you, since no one I know is as stupid and reckless as you. Besides, you’re British. Someone less generous than I might have already cursed you.”

Of course Newt doesn’t blame any of them. They’re quite right: he is stupid, he is reckless, and he is quite British. That’s obvious enough later on from what he mutters as he crashes through another hedgerow of spiky vegetation he can’t classify: “Oh, bugger these bushes.” 

At least he’s finally in the vicinity of the supposed Nundu. Its territory is fairly huge, so Newt is rather hoping that he’ll just sort of stumble across the big cat and have done with it all. He’s dispensed with everything except shirtsleeves and a hat—token protection against the sun because he’s going to turn into a single large freckle if this keeps up—just to deal with the heat. It might not be geographically true at all, but Newt feels like he’s been sat directly on the Equator. 

He pitches a sort of camp—really a hidden spot where he can tuck his suitcase away and make thorough use of it instead of needing to pitch a tent—and sets himself out for success. Newt is no stranger to seeking that which does not want to be found. He has a Demiguise, he has sought Bowtruckles, he’s chased down merfolk and centaurs and even more secretive creatures. And Newt hasn’t failed yet. But he’s not looking for something lost or hidden this time. He’s looking for a beast which hunts elephant and hippopotamus and rhino, which will tear apart an entire pride of lions, which can kill a dragon. It should be easy.

It isn’t easy.

Nundu are very big, but there is an awful lot of Rhodesia to search. Thabani’s map is terrifically accurate, but it can’t convey the sheer scale of the territory the Nundu claims. Newt gets very familiar with the mile radius around his home base, learning the ground until he can Apparate anywhere within it, and then begins to widen his search.

Newt sees plenty of evidence of the Nundu. A creature so powerful can’t help but leave traces. There are clear signs of predation; Newt frequently stumbles across kill sites where the Nundu ate one of the smaller herbivores that traverse this area. In the bank of a narrow creek, huge footprints are sunk into the mud. There’s a roar in the night, once, but Newt can’t track it fast enough. He knows the Nundu is there and he’s certain that the Nundu knows he’s there. But it doesn’t care about him. He’s nothing to such a creature.

It’s just come to the beginning of October. Newt is considering moving on. He’s documented plenty of the wildlife in the area and has begun to construct a real idea of the biome within the Nundu’s habitat. Of course there are the wondrous ordinary beasts, which Newt records with the same intensity that he would record his real target. There are other magical creatures for which he doesn’t have a name—herds of antelope which sing with bird voices, a grove of animated trees, frogs whose croaking causes flashes of lightning on the water—but not a real sight of the Nundu. 

And that’s when the elephants arrive.

Newt doesn’t know much about elephants. They’re supposed to be ordinary beasts, and yet Newt has heard stories since coming to Africa that spells ricochet off their hides, that they are as intelligent as a man, that they themselves can perform magic. Newt isn’t sure how many of those stories are true and he doesn’t really care, because all he knows is that no matter what, they have their own kind of magic.

Of course Newt goes to observe them. Elephants are migratory; they won’t be here for long. And he wants to have notes, sketches, ideas—because when will he get a chance to see such creatures again?

That’s how he comes to be perched in a tree, scribbling frantically without looking down at his hands while he watches the elephants. It’s a serene moment: the elephants are merely browsing in the trees, plucking choice morsels for themselves, communicating with each other in their way. Newt listens to their peaceful rumbling, watches ears flap and tails twitch, sees gentle touches shared between family and friends. What beautiful creatures.

A movement off to the side catches Newt’s eye. He glances and sees only a dark streak hurtling low to the ground before there is a roar and the Nundu pounces on the nearest elephant. Newt drops his notebook as he pitches forward, eyes wide, clutching at the branches of his tree. The elephant screams and turns in circles as the others trumpet and howl, ears standing out with rage. 

The Nundu tears at the elephant with huge claws, clinging to its back and biting at it. The elephant shakes its head and stamps, tossing its tusks. The other elephants circle, trumpeting helplessly, as the Nundu rends the elephant’s flesh and shakes it, breaking its neck. 

But it seems the Nundu didn’t quite calculate correctly. As the elephant collapses beneath it, the Nundu doesn’t see the other elephant charging at it. Its tusk skewers the Nundu straight through the side and the Nundu howls, thrown off-balance. And then the elephant kicks the Nundu. Even a creature the size of an omnibus or more can’t hold up against such force. Newt stares with round eyes as the other elephants take their cue and attack the Nundu in force. 

Really, they must be magic, because the Nundu can’t seem to touch them. It fights back, of course, but Newt would have expected it to do more against them. But there are ten or twelve elephants and together they’re very large and very heavy and the Nundu can’t be everywhere at once. Clinically, Newt files that away: assuming that Thabani is correct (and Newt has every reason to believe the other wizard), then a single elephant is a match for at least ten wizards. 

He wonders briefly why it doesn't use its poison breath, and then reconsiders: should it do that, it'd toxify a significant chunk of its territory. Strategically, that's not a good choice unless the Nundu is under attack by a truly overwhelming force. In its eyes, the elephants must not count. Which is stunning, when the damage they're doing is so great.

The elephants flee before the Nundu can regain its feet. In what seems a moment, they’re gone, and the Nundu is left bleeding beside the body of its prey. 

It makes a wounded noise, a defiant roar as it struggles to its feet. And then it sinks down again, panting. Newt waits an agonizing moment, then a second. He shouldn’t. He really shouldn’t. He is stupid, reckless, and altogether too British. 

He climbs out of the tree, remembers everything he ever knew about big cats, and approaches the Nundu. Newt remains as relaxed as possible and carries himself tall, head held high, toward the Nundu. Of course the approach must be slow; even injured severely, the Nundu will have no compunctions about simply biting Newt in half.

The great cat pricks up its ears at his approach, turning its head inquisitively. It watches Newt with wide eyes. It’s visibly in pain, but it isn’t lashing out at Newt.

“Hello,” Newt says steadily. His heart is beating remarkably slowly. The Nundu is about the same size as a Thunderbird or a dragon. And Newt’s spent time with both. “You’re hurt.”

The Nundu’s ears flatten to its head. It growls, but not in a particularly threatening way. Still, Newt stops in his tracks. He stands very still.

“I’d like to help you, if I might,” Newt says steadily. 

Another growl, but the Nundu’s ears prick up again. It doesn’t look as aggressive and Newt feels comfortable continuing his approach. He gets within fifteen feet—respectable distance when those paws have at least a ten-foot reach—and stops again. He waits for the Nundu to give a signal, cataloguing its injuries. One leg is broken—likely in several places—and there are other injuries in plenty. 

It doesn’t ever spook and Newt begins to heal up the surface injuries. He thinks he’s got its trust at least a little by the time that he’s dealt with most of the superficial wounds. It stays in one place, anyway, while he retrieves the suitcase so he can treat the worse injuries. It’s all very complicated, but the Nundu—fully occupied with tearing into its elephant—takes the treatments with good grace. 

By nightfall, the Nundu has devoured most of the elephant and looks lazy and happy, willing to let Newt go so far as to pet its neck. The fur is quite soft, though the neck is spiked. The Nundu doesn’t purr, unsurprising since the non-magical big cats like tigers only chuff, but it does make a sort of deep groan which seems happy enough. 

Newt can’t determine if the Nundu is male or female, so he leaves that question for the moment in favor of working out what to do next. It’s not as if the Nundu is a tame cat, but its injuries are bad enough that even now Newt is worried about its survival. He’s sure that its docility is due to severe shock, from the broken limb and crushed ribs and internal damage. A real diagnosis isn’t entirely possible—Newt is nervous of getting close enough to the mouth to check the temperature of the gums, and he doesn’t know a Nundu’s healthy heart rate or temperature so those are useless—but this kind of listless lethargy is characteristic of most felines in shock, so it’s reasonable to assume a similar state. 

If the Nundu is that badly hurt, then Newt will have to care for it in the long term. There are things he can do—intravenous fluids for blood loss, application of extract of deadly nightshade to speed the heart rate if necessary, and surgery on damaged organs—but he needs the Nundu in his suitcase. From what Thabani told him, Nundu have territory reasonably close together. If this one is injured, another will come and Newt will be in real trouble. 

“And you won’t have long, if you’re really hurt,” Newt murmurs to the beast. It growls low and its tail moves weakly. That decides it: Newt can’t just leave the Nundu behind.

He coaxes it into the suitcase with the promise of a fresh-killed antelope. It growls at him, when he tries to help it; Newt backs away and lets the Nundu descend on its own. The spark of intelligence common to many magical creatures is in its eyes and Newt doesn’t doubt that it understands him far better than any regular cat would. 

Guiding the Nundu to the most appropriate habitat is no easy measure. He has to get it past Frank and the Erumpet and the Graphorns, which is a problem because large creatures generally don’t like each other much. And the Nundu is exhausted beyond words: by the time it arrives in the savanna at the outer reach of the suitcase the Nundu is trembling. It sinks down in the grass with a whimper. Newt’s heart breaks a little. 

He does set up an intravenous line, and does what he can to stave off hypothermia. The extract of deadly nightshade isn’t necessary, in the end, since the great feline’s heart rate does seem to stabilize. Newt talks to the Nundu the whole time he’s working, keeping up a steady, soothing chatter. Dougal—truly the best of creatures—comes and sits by, and cuddles up to the Nundu’s face with the fearlessness only a creature which can turn invisible has. 

It’s amazing how quickly Newt has come to feel comfortable beside a creature the size of an omnibus, honestly. Once it’s finally asleep, Newt makes himself a small nest in the grass twenty feet away, for safety. It’s just a thin blanket, but the ambient heat of the savanna is enough to make it comfortable. Dougal curls up at his chest and falls asleep, soft fur and warm body a comforting weight. 

Newt listens to the Nundu breathing, for a while, steady and slow at last. It isn’t panting, which is a good sign. It’s coming out of shock, and will probably be all right. With those comforting thoughts, Newt falls asleep. 

The Nundu doesn’t eat him in the night, and the next morning Newt plans out his next moves. “I think we’ll have to head back to civilization,” he tells the Nundu through a mouthful of bread and butter, crumbs falling onto the collar of his shirt. Newt ignores that in favor of casting a multiplication charm on the antelope he’d brought in for the cat’s breakfast. “You can’t stay here, that’s for certain.”

With a growl, the Nundu tears into its large meal, ignoring Newt thoroughly. Newt’s satisfied with that. He has other business to take care of. Still eating, though not really thinking much about what he’s putting in his mouth, Newt heads back to the center of the suitcase to take stock. He’s got another probably-illegal creature in his suitcase, this one very big and very injured, and a desperate need to get the hell out of Rhodesia. 

“Bother all of these ridiculous laws,” Newt mutters, shoving a large tome off his desk. It lands with a thud. Theseus, in a well-meaning move, had given it to him just before Newt set out, and Newt can’t stand the thing. “It’s just a creature.”

He unrolls a map and rests his wand in the square middle of Southern Rhodesia. “Quaervia,” Newt commands, and watches a thin line of blue light snake out from the tip of his wand across the rest of Africa. This one’s a useful charm, a very experimental thing that he’d picked up in one of the musty old grimoires that he inevitably collected in every country he visited. Most of them are strange, complicated, and even Dark, but not this. It’s a spell that finds the easiest way across a map, invaluable in travel through mostly-unmapped country like this. 

“Really?” Newt shakes his head, staring at the line. He’d come down from Egypt in a mostly-straight line, except a really uncomfortable detour in the middle of Tanganyika Territory, and that had been a long trip. This one will be just as long. Back across Southern Rhodesia, up through the Belgian Congo (perhaps he’ll see a Mokèlé-mbèmbé, if he’s lucky), across a bit of French Equatorial Africa, and ending in Spanish Guinea. 

Though it’s annoying, it’s a route that will make sense. The spell is quite good at picking up the safest way to go, and though Spanish Guinea is a long way off it will be the safest. Most of Africa has a justifiably poor opinion of the British: Thabani is a particularly generous man, and not lying when he said that anyone else would have hexed Newt where he stood. Spanish Guinea is quite a diverse colony and Newt won’t stand out as much there. 

And he has to start immediately. He can’t afford delays, now he’s got three of the world’s most dangerous creatures packed away in a suitcase. Frank is doing much better—by the time they get to Arizona he’ll be well enough to be released—the Nundu will need healing and time, and there’s the sad creature who doesn’t bear thinking about; who Newt will have to think about, eventually. 

He gives the Arctic zone a long look. Its lone inhabitant isn’t visible at the moment, probably floating just below a hillock of snow. Lucky that the habitat is empty of other creatures; Newt hasn’t visited the Artic proper yet. And now it’s occupied by the most tragic of creatures. Newt doesn’t know what to do about it, how even to approach it, though he does, once or twice a week. It can’t hear him, but surely—surely there’s something left of that poor little girl. 

Well. That’s a question for a different day, isn’t it? “I suppose we’ll go off across Africa, then,” Newt says to the dung beetles. Of course they ignore him, but the Fwooper trills and Newt startles into a quick Silencing Charm. Someday he’ll get knocked out, he really will. But for now—

Newt climbs out of the suitcase and locks it up tightly. He looks around at the great savanna around him, brilliant in the light of day, and squares his shoulders. 

Time to carry on.

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaaaaaand the inevitable "bluebeholder does too much research and delays publication of a story that should have been finished last week just to get weird esoteric details right" footnote appears!
> 
> “The Colony of Southern Rhodesia” was the name for what is now Zimbabwe when it was under British rule as a self-governing colony. In 1923, the first constitution came into force. The situation still was totally fucked, exploitative, and non-beneficial to natives, because imperialism is totally fucked, exploitative, and non-beneficial to natives, but that’s at least the explanation of the name and where Newt is. And as for why he’s alone: he’s a British man coming into the home territory of the Ndebele, who were the native group suppressed by the British. The Second Matabele War was fought in 1896, ending in a crushing defeat for the Ndebele and their allies. I find it very hard to believe that the Ndebele magical community would have anything good to say about the British. No one is going to help Newt as he enters their country. 
> 
> The name of the contact came from a list on a site dedicated to teaching the Ndebele language. I linked to the name list; I recommend reading the rest of the blog as well. 
> 
> Nundu behavior: I went for something between tiger and lion with a heavy shot of “nearly sentient magical beast.” Tiger and lion behavior is FASCINATING OKAY.
> 
> AND NO, Newt could not have left Equatorial Guinea for New York. IT WASN’T EQUATORIAL GUINEA IN 1926, IT WAS SPANISH GUINEA. Welcome to the history of European interaction with Africa: FUCKING COLONIALISM. You thought I was here to write about the Nundu? THINK AGAIN. The Spanish controlled what became Equatorial Guinea from 1778 to 1968. So yeah: SCRIPT ANACHRONISM. I’m not the only one who caught this one, but I’m not surprised, given that this fandom is kind of an offshoot of the notoriously stick-up-its-ass-about-continuity Harry Potter fandom. I love it. I have found MY PEOPLE. 
> 
> If you want to see a period-accurate map of the continent: the University of Milwaukee has you covered.
> 
> Newt’s Nundu treatment plan is drawn from what I could get of shock treatments in house cats, of all things (couldn’t locate exact info for big cats unfortunately). Here’s PetMD on shock in house cats. Interesting note: intravenous fluids were being used therapeutically in the early 1830s, when physician William Brooke O’Shaughnessy used them in the treatment of cholera. As for the extract of deadly nightshade—that’s atropine, a chemical which can be used to speed low heart rate and is one possible treatment for cats whose hearts slow down due to shock. If I have any veterinarians in the audience who wanna shout at me, please do, I'm happy to take any and all advice.


End file.
